3-4 weeks seems to be settling down as my intra-entry
interval, so here I am again right on, or perhaps a teensy
bit behind, schedule.

Life is still grand - I'm not so rabid about cooking in
the mornings any more - I've gotten pretty good at the
perfect omelet, I just generally prefer to sleep for the
extra 10 minutes that a bowl of cereal buys me. Dinner
though, is still a cooking party. I got my manual pasta
maker, which makes a world of difference believe me. When
amy & I cook the packaged pasta now - even the good
quality
stuff, it just seems flavourless by comparison.

Work is making sense now - I'm actually producing code,
starting to merit IBM's investment, and generally
understanding what's going on to a far greater extent. The
beauty of working on a product line that came into
existence a month before you joined the company is that
everything is very one-point-oh, but that's a double edged
sword. No question it's where I want to be, I love this
kind of work - work that actually requires/allows me to
make relevant decisions - but it's... interesting at
times. Imagine the amount of documentation that exists,
for instance, on something brand new and kind of
complicated to boot. Now cut that estimate in half and
spread it all over a company with 350,000 employees.
Interesting.

I guess my CompSci profs should be proud - their message
got through to me - document document document - and now
I'm in the real world, reading vast expanses of code, and
the documentation is sparse. Or not where I'd expect it,
anyhow - it does exist... somewhere. But I'll continue
doing my part anyhow - in-code explanations, javadoc
comments on every method - actual written specs that are up
to date. Maybe that makes me a keener. I'd like to think
it also makes me a better developer, though.

My hacking life is done by proxy right now. I'm
learning php while teaching it to Amy, who is going to
whip up her first cgi driven site and who has relatively
little programming to fall back on. PHP seemed like a safe
choice - I might have recommended JSPs, I'd certainly enjoy
reading a couple books on the subject, but I think that
would be too much extra work for too little extra
payout - at least for her needs. So our evenings right now
are cook dinner, racquetball, SQL tutorial. Or cook
dinner, racquetball, C-style syntax refresher. Or... etc.
Essentially, I just read through the php docs faster than
she does, and answer the questions she has since I've got a
little more background to which to attach this stuff. I
gotta say, btw, props to PHP's doc writers - they use
excellent, unambiguous language when describing the
features of php, makes a compsci major feel quite at home.
Does manage to be a little intimidating to newcomers
though, I'm guessing. Perhaps there should be "Programming
PHP" and "Learning PHP" style manuals, to steal from perl's
format. Perhaps there already are...

Extra! Extra! I find out, just after writing
this, that I have had copyrights infringed-upon! How
exciting. My AI
tutorial (written a couple
years ago for psych students) has been copied, almost in
full, by these guys. They have preserved
our names at the top (though they removed the mailto:'s)
and they have removed all our copyright notices.
Charming. I've written to the prof with whom I wrote the
tutorial, to get his thoughts on the matter. I'm inclined
to let it be - I wrote that tutorial because I thought
people might find it educational, maybe even interesting.
For the most part, I'm happy it's reached a larger
audience. I do wish they'd been a little more polite about
it though. We'll see.

For two weeks now, I have been an IBM employee. I have
also just finished moving, and so the short story is that
my life has been very busy. All things considered then, 3
weeks since my last diary entry can hardly be considered
surprising.

Home life is good, great even, but takes some getting
used to. We love the apartment: the move from a
basement with little light and no climate control to a wide
open, spacious apartment with frostbite-level air
conditioning and a downright pretty kitchen has just been
incredible. I have ordered in once in two and a half
weeks, and even then it was more just to try the local wing
joint than because I really needed to - cooking is every
bit as rewarding as I thought it would be, and I am eating
splendidly. :) We haven't started playing racquetball
regularly yet, but we've played enough sporadically for me
to know I'll enjoy it, and we've even gotten a semi-regular
poker night going, so all in all, I'm pleased.

The getting-used-to that I mentioned is mostly getting
used to working real hours. 8 hours plus an unpaid lunch,
plus commute, can make a day feel pretty long, and make my
home time feel pretty short, but I'm getting there - the
nights are starting to feel less cramped - and having
weekends all to myself, with no essays, with *nothing*
overhead, is an unmitigated joy.

IBM is turning out to be surprisingly cool. Red tape is
almost non-existant, which is simply unbelievable for a
company this size, but there it sits. I am working pretty
heavily with XML and Java, which is a happy place for me to
be, and I'm doing some pretty fun stuff to boot, designing
the tools that will be used to make a business 'e'. It's a
bit jarring at first - you start to twitch because all
around you people are spouting these buzzwords: e-business,
XML (DTD, Schema, etc), integration tooling - and to be
sure, some part of it is just buzzword parrotting, but a
surprisingly large proportion of these people are actually
using the terms because they're appropriate - they're using
the technologies because it's the right choice to make, not
because of the infamous phb factor - heck, my b doesn't
even have ph! :)

Point is, work-wise, home-wise, things are pretty
pleasant. Geek-wise, things are still a little too busy,
and a little too still-in-their-moving-boxes for the geek
factor to get going again, but it will come, and lord help
me, a significant chunk of my upcoming paycheques will be
feeding that geek fetish.

One week till we move into our new place. That's pretty
exciting, and it means 9 days till I start work.

Predictably enough, May has not quite been the reading-
gorge-fest I had hoped - too many things crop up when you
think you have time off - but Java is still being absorbed,
and I picked up the O'Reilly XML book, so that's next on
the hit list.

Life is good, but most of my life is in boxes at the
moment, so life is also pretty lean at the moment; imagine
being down to only about a dozen books.

No significant hacking has transpired for a while - I'll
have to get back in. Paradoxically, I think I will do more
free-time hacking when I'm working than when I have time
off. Go figure.

This entry's pretty lightweight, since I'm on my way out
the door, so I'll compensate with a poem from Louis Dudek
which I really like.

Freedom

My two dogs
tied to a tree
by a ten-foot leash
kept whining and howling for an hour
till I let them off.

Now they are lying quietly on the grass
a few feet further from the tree
and they haven't moved since I let them go.

Freedom may be
only an idea
but it's a matter of principle
even to a dog.

End - I submitted my last marks file today for
the course I tutor. I've TA'd this course for 4 semesters
now and it's been a lot of fun. I may have actually set a
couple novice programmers down the right path. I'll have
to find another way to teach now, I like it.

End - I am studying for the first of my 2 exams -
Natural Language Programming. This is it - I write one
wednesday, one in early May, and then school's done. I
will come back, I will take other courses but in the larger
sense, for the time being, school is over.

Beginning - I bought The Java Programming
Language 3rd ed. the other day. That means I'm officially
ready to
start the Java binge that will occupy much of May. That in
turn reflects the fact that I will be starting work for IBM
in a month.

Beginning - Last Saturday Amy and I signed the
lease. We are officially apartment owners now. We are
officially roommates now. We even put a deposit down on a
couch, chair and ottoman set we like. I don't know whether
this, or the IBM job, is the bigger beginning.

Beginning - My 8" Sabatier Chef's Knife arrived
last Friday, meaning the trip towards becoming a competent
cook has also started. Of course, I can't do anything with
it yet except take it out and look at it approvingly, or
slice baby carrots with it - but you know, I'm still
jazzed. :)

Goodness, my certs are slipping fast: from Journeyer
down to Observer in a month or so. What's that about?

4 days left. I don't want to sound like I'm just
waiting for school to be over, I've loved university life,
and a non-trivial part of me still clings to the notion
that these will not be my last days here, that I am just
going on hiatus for a bit. Having said that though, in 4
days, I'll be 2 exams away from being a University
Graduate, "with all the privileges and responsibilities of
that rank." Man. 4 years of essay writing and formalized
thinking have left me no better off for expressing how I
feel.

May is going to be a really great month, I
think. One
day of interruption to write a logic exam in what will
otherwise be a month of hacking and knowledge absorption.
I will get to make some important upgrades to
CanonicalTomes.org
and maybe even some upgrades to beep, of
all things. That, plus learning all there is to know about
Java. We're talking immersion. We're talking remind-me-to-
change-my-underwear-and-eat-occasionally immersion. By
God, it'll be beautiful.

Amy got the IBM job. The ramifications of this
sentence
are myriad and complex, so if necessary, re-read it. It
means that we can sign a lease. It means that we can buy
furniture. It means she and I will be living together. It
means we will both be in positions we like, at good pay,
and insofar as the above contributes to one's sense of
wellbeing in the universe, it means we will be happier.

I'm so in to cooking now. 4 years of living in
an
apartment without a stove has made me nutty. I'm all about
cooking now. If May is Java-month and June is Getting-
Established-in-New-Life-month, then so help me July through
December will be Johnath-learns-how-to-be-a-badass-cook-
month. I can't wait. Yesterday on impulse I picked up a
Sabatier 8" Chef's Knife (forged, of course) for $15. It's
an "Elite" which is a far cry from their nicest line, but
an 8" forged high-carbon blade for $15 is tough to pass
up. Or maybe I'm really obsessed with this cooking thing.

How cool is it that CanonicalTomes has precisely the
books I will need for Java- and Cooking- months? It does
exactly what I want it to. This pleases me.

CT is now
in full swing. It's been slashbacked, it's been k5'd, and
it's now got well over 500 books, and coming up on 1200
votes. Nice. It is also actually useful now - I've
managed to find books in topics I wasn't familiar with that
are agreed to be standards (dude, Blacksmithing?) Now it enters the next
phase - slower growth, plus some time for me to work on
incorporating suggested features and fixes. In this form,
it will incubate for a while, followed maybe by a re-
announcement down the line, when it's all polished and
useful.

School is winding down - 6 things left, 3 weeks left,
then it's all over. Man. I don't yet have anything to say
about that.

Apartment hunting is going very well, we think we've
found The Place - at least for a year or so, till we can
pick up a mortgage on a condo. Good location (Yonge &
Finch, for any Torontonians reading) - significantly north
of the downtown core, but still on the subway line, still
very much *in* Toronto. The building itself rocks
hardcore, our suite will be a little small but very
workable, and hey, right now I live in a 12'x18' basement
with no kitchen, so you know, I'll cope.

Still very jazzed about IBM. Very. I have already
decided that in May, I will be reading many many books on
Java, I will be steeping myself in Java, I will, by the end
of it, grok Java in all its infinite glory. And XML.
Middleware at IBM means Java + XML, it seems. In a brand
new lab facility. Ubiquitous wireless LAN. Multiple on-
site cafes and restaurants. This rules.

Birds are coming back, and when I walk across the iced-
over grassy parts of campus, the ice is at that stage where
everywhere you step, it cracks through, and little
fountains of brown meltwater soak your shoes. It tried to
snow today, but I think this is just winter throwing a final
tantrum; spring is coming very soon, which also rules.
Spring is it for me. Except for the rain, I am all about
spring.

I have been watching way too much of the cooking channel
lately. I am looking forward to having a stove and to
being able to cook without a microwave. Anyone recommend a
good cooking knife? I want a good cooking knife. Ming
Tsai has these really cool looking ceramic knives, all
white, and apparently they hold their edge much better than
steel, but they're wicked expensive. I'm thinking just a
good set of Henckels.

CanonicalTomes.org
is up and running. This has been on my mind for the last
month or so, since a conversation about it in an earlier
advogato discussion spawned multiple offers of free server
space. It's getting hits, I'm getting feedback - it's even
been trolled a couple times, which had to happen, and which
I am still, for the moment, on top of.

Man it feels good to have that done. I'm still
obviously going to be very tied to it, with upkeep and so
forth, but the site's simple - even the troll removal is
pretty straightforward. The hardest part was getting people
to notice, and between a kuro5hin
article about it which seems to be getting the votes it
needs, and hopefully an upcoming mention in a slashback, it
should begin babysteps towards usefulness now.

School is in full swing now, and I just finished
off the first segment of my natural language programming
course-long-assignment. Man, perl is good at a lot of
things, but when you use it for the purposes it was
originally designed, gathering, extracting, and reporting
data, it absolutely glows.

CanonicalTomes.org is still being hosted on my home system, but is about
to move over to reactor-core.org (thanks JW!) and from
there, ideally, explode. Everything works now, it's simply
a matter of adding extra features where appropriate - and I
must say, the whole idea of having a site that may actually
take off... has me rather jazzed. By all means, head over
and poke at it if you haven't yet. But no submitting to
slashdot. :) Actually, the /. guys (well, timothy and
hemos) have both been quite cool about the prospect of
posting it, though they say they'll hold off till it has
some more content - which makes sense.

Life is moving along about as well as can be
expected. House-hunting with Amy was cut drastically short
when we found out that banks won't issue a mortgage to
people who are officially employed "on probation". Now, my
position with IBM is a permanent one, not a tentative 1yr
contract or anything - but the contract does have the
phrase "9 month probationary period" in there, which - I'm
assured - is as far as the bank will read before getting
out the NO stamp. So we'll rent. I guess a year of
renting won't kill me - I just resent building someone
else's equity instead of my own. On the plus side though,
this means not having to sink myself into some temporarily
nasty debt on downpayments and stuff - which means I can
actually purchase furniture, and food, and Stuff, which is
nice.

Hacking is pretty much solely on canonicaltomes
right now which, considering I had to pick up perl and
postgres on the fly, is not an insignificant thing, but
with luck, the hackery part of it should now be gradient-
fading into the maintenance and evangelizing phase. I've
got a couple other website thoughts in mind - I think next
time I'll try PHP, just so I can compare the feel of
external code vs embedded code. Zope also looks very
cool. beep is still getting
hits, which is great - but it's pretty wrapped up for the
moment, barring overwhelming re-architecting (which is a
silly word for a 9k program).

CanonicalTomes is a step closer to being done. I'm still
hosting it on my own server, because it's still in
development, but if people want to play with it a little
(http://johnath.com/~ct)
I wouldn't mind any feedback that
comes in. Be nice, it's running on a p100/32M RAM, so no
submitting it to slashdot, but by all means, log in, submit
books, submit topics, vote, and tell me what you think
(johnath at johnath.com).

(For those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about,
CanonicalTomes arose out of a thought of mine that leaked
onto an advogato discussion a while back, and which
subsequently became an actual Undertaking of mine. It's a
DB-driven site - perl + postgres - which aspires to
catalog, for each topic of interest to its users, the
Bibles of the topic - its Canonical (standard, normal,
dictated-by-law) Tomes (books, especially big, important
ones) as it were. I don't know how excited this makes
people, but it's something I know I would like to have.)

Please, in addition to the site, if you have the time, take
a look also at the Privacy and Free Use of Data policies,
and let me know what you think on that score. In short the
policies are, respectively, "Never give away or use any
personal information ever. Never never never." and "Make
regular exports of all non-private databases available
(i.e. book and topic information) freely to everyone."

Or, if this ain't your cup of tea, ignore what I'm saying
here. :)

PS - I put this in diary, not frontpage because I don't
want to use advogato for self-promotion that shameless...
here's hoping this is good enough to generate a little beta-
tester traffic.